There are over 2.800 villages listed as abandoned in Spain. These crumbling towns are, in a very real sense, visual monuments to a moment in time the rest of the world has long forgotten. During this residency, Kendall-Aranda will play with Google Maps’ Street View features to create an online space where Internet visitors will be able to virtually stroll through these villages amongst recreated ghost inhabitants, and by doing so, provide a new perspective on our collective past and present.

TOBES, EL ALAMIN AND OREJA ARE NOW READY TO BE VISITED! SCROLL DOWN TO CHECK THEM OUT!

The little village of Tobes in Guadalajara was abandoned in 1973. It has around twenty houses that are still in very good condition and which housed up to 90 villagers at one point in time. In 2004 it was chosen as the set for “El Guardavías”, the first movie to be exclusively directed, filmed and produced entirely by children. Currently a Canadian entrepreneur has bought the town and is in the process of converting it into a tourist destination.

El Alamin was a town built by the Count of Ruiseñada and his son the Marquis of Comillas in 1956 and vacated less than 50 years later. The town was built in the “colonization” style that was favored during the Franco dictatorship years. The name is of Muslim origin and refers to all living creations that exist in the heavens and the earth, on land and at sea.

This village is called Oreja, which can be translated as "Ear" in English. It was abandoned in the early 1960s. Located on top of a cliff near Toledo, the town has Roman and Muslim roots, a hermitage, and a castle dating from c. 1085.

A Little More about the Project... Mas información sobre el proyecto...

“Tourism literature commonly advocates the use of leaps in time, from the "fishing village" to the "tourist center", alluding to an undated past, eternal, permanently anchored outside of time, stuck in a stillness that only awakens before the click of the cameras; this fantasy responds to the tourist’s obsession about the "discovery" of the "unknown" place. The insistence on maintaigning this décalage stems from the need to emphasize a temporal contrast between two periods, between two moments of History. A unique History in which only chronological differences would be recognized.”

Many abandoned Spanish villages are in the process of becoming spas, tourist centers, even sports venues, and in a way that directly relates to what Marie-Françoise Lanfant describes as the tourist’s fantasy to discover a hidden natural gem. This mindset obliterates large portions of the history of these villages. Ghost Town Initiative aims to mesh together this flickering past with the present. And by doing so, it creates a fiction in time, in which two eras merge into one.Google Street View becomes a vehicle for Internet users who wish to travel to these abandoned villages, haunted by ghosts during the month of December.